Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Eric and Weeble!

I bought these little beauties a while back, but I thought it was time to share them with you.

But before going into details of their background, I thought I do a quick run-down of all the cat brooches Colin Baker wore - don’t worry, there’s actually only seven.

During his time as The Doctor, Colin Baker incorporated his love of cats into his costume in a couple of novel ways: inside the yellow lapel of his coat he added a cat silhouette for every adventure he got under his belt (see below, right); and on the pink lapel of his coat he had a cat brooch (see below, left).

The apparent plan was to fill the yellow lapel with silhouettes, then move onto the pink, but this was completely abandoned after Revelation Of The Daleks, and the silhouettes were never seen again.

Brooch One
The first brooch was a china tortoise shell cat, which was used from The Twin Dilemma through to Vengeance On Varos.
I was lucky enough to get myself an exact copy in 1985, when the artist who created it did a very limited run of replicas (see left).

This is always the one that sticks in my mind, as it was used the most and I had one on my prized Sixth Doctor Frock Coat replica I had made (see right).

Subsequently, Colin had a whole series of cat brooches, each of which he wore for barely one story each.

Brooch TwoMark Of The Rani and Timelash saw a back cat with an arched back (see left, top);

True that Colin Baker only wore seven badges, but if you want to be *very* completist the Sixth Doctor actually wore eight - at the start of Time And The Rani the coat has a grey-and-black Siamese pin on it.